Teaching Great Reading Skills: What does that look like?
There is a difference between helping a child to read and helping a child to read really well. It isn’t enough to help a child in learning the alphabet and a few sight words. Teachers and parents should set goals to help kids read with fluency and understanding or comprehension.
Reading should have meaning attached to it. Reading should be an active learning activity. Reading is not a passive learning activity whereby a struggling reader skims over words and fails to connect them into meaningful sentences, complete thoughts and ideas about concepts and stories.
How can we help struggling readers with the task of learning good literacy skills from the beginning? What kinds of goals and strategies should parents or teachers use to help kids who struggle with learning language skills, phonic skills or with a diagnosed disability such as dyslexia, attention deficit disorders or any other learning disabilities?
Start reading to them early
There isn’t a magical age to start reading to a child. In general, as soon as a child can sit in an adult’s lap and “look” at things, it is easy to sit and read and point to pictures in a children’s picture book. This is an easy and fun way to start helping a child to gain interest in books and reading and learning with almost no effort.
Points to consider when reading to a very young child
Teaching Tracking
When you read to a young baby or toddler, use your index finger to run from left to right across the page as you read each word. This easy strategy will help a child to learn the direction of reading the text by modeling it. No need for explanation- your child will be learning by observation. You can also help a child read by taking their little hand, pointing their index finger outward while running it along the page as you read out loud to them. This is an easy and interactive way to teach your child how to track while reading.
Learning to Focus
Helping a child with struggles from their toddler years up to about the end of second grade, it is a good idea to watch for how long a child can focus. With a young baby or toddler it is easy to see them focus intently on an image or an object. When a child this young has a problem with focus, they will naturally look away. This is a signal to you as a parent or teacher that the child has information overload their brain needs a break. Don’t force them to refocus- this causes frustration with learning.
This same advice applies to children in early elementary school grades. They might sit nicely and work intently on letters or words and perhaps struggle through a sentence or two and then suddenly look elsewhere, become uninterested in the story or book you are reading or show challenges with frustration or anxious hyperactivity. When you see these signs in a child, it is a good indicator of a struggling reader who is having a problem in overcoming deficiencies. Help the child by taking a break and let the child move around the room or engage in another activity for a moment. Keep a vigilant eye on the continued struggle and if the problem doesn’t fade as their reading improves it may be time to further evaluate the student’s reading struggle.
What is your child interested in reading?
The best way to help your child is to make the subject that you are teaching relevant to the child’s interest. Let’s face it, if you are learning math it is far easier to apply the math concepts to something that you do frequently in your life rather than an abstract concept that you may or may not use in the future. For example, learning how to balance a bank account makes sense to a person because it directly relates to income and outgoing money that belongs to that person. However, learning the quadratic formula is an abstract concept that many of us may or may not remember from our school days.
The point is this: if you want to keep a child’s interest in a book, assign activities that the child can practice with those skills that are needed to build quick word recognition, greater fluency and comprehension of the text. It will always be more effective to keep things relevant to their interests. Does your toddler like dogs? Does your child have an interest in tractors or vehicles in general? Use those favorite things, find books with great images of those favorite things and read about them. If sharks scare a child, you may find a toddler who wants to leave your lap rather than a child who will sit and enjoy the book about sharks.
Books and Reading Levels
One thing that many parents have in common is their pride over how smart their children are. This is a wonderful thing- until it causes the problem of pushing too hard and too fast in school. If a toddler can recite the alphabet, recognize letters and read a word or two- that’s fantastic! But this is not an indicator that a four year old will be reading a second grade reader next month.
Allow a child to enjoy their success. Allow the child to use their free time to read a lot of books at their current reading level. This gives a child a sense of accomplishment and ability when they can transfer these newly learned skills to more than one book. Given enough time, they will show signs that they want to set higher reading goals. They will start to recognize words on signs as you are driving, read boxes and labels at the grocery store, read taglines on television out loud while they are watching or they might point out words in a book you are reading as a parent who models good reading skills.
It is not helpful to push them along before they are ready. It only creates a problem of feeling frustration before they have had a chance to experience the feeling of success.
Conversations and Language
Learning to read is just one aspect of learning to utilize language. Long before a child learns the letters of the alphabet or makes a connection between letters and corresponding sounds, a child will have established a substantial amount of language learning by speaking and being spoken to.
The Importance of Teaching Verbal Communication
Parents and Modeling Language
From the birth of a child up through preschool years a child has listened to and learned thousands of words. By hearing words, eventually the child imitated and repeated these words and over time made associations to specific words based on the responses that they received when they said these words out loud. It is reasonable to expect that the more a child is spoken to and encouraged to speak, that they are learning more word associations to things that are both concrete and abstract. An example of a concrete association would be saying “juice” and receiving juice as a result. An example of a more abstract association would be expressing a feeling statement such as “I’m sad” to which the response might be varied: a hug, a cookie or special time with mom or dad.
Applying the spoken word to the written word
As a child grows older and language skills are evolving, a child will be able to express thoughts in the written form. This happens at a young age when they write their own name, family members' names, as they label favorite items, write notes, poems or short stories during times of creativity. Writing skills are similar to speaking in that writing requires continuous encouragement and modeling. The best way to do this is to sit and write with the child or create word challenges or games like “how many sounds do you hear in dog?” (there are three: /d/ /o/ /g/). You can also play in the car by asking your child to find specific letters on billboards and license plates. There are teachable moments everywhere and anytime!
Writing Activities
Writing is a way for children to use what they have learned by exposure to books, good modeling by parents and teachers and by what they have learned about letters and sounds in the early years. Writing is a culmination of all of the hearing, seeing, saying and reading practice. For a child to be able to write as literacy skills progress is an indication of learning phonics and developing word recognition.
Writing is the Kinesthetic Aspect of Language
See it, Hear it, Touch it
A child can look at letters and words, they can listen to a story as it is read out loud and they can read the words themselves. But, for those students who learn best by a kinesthetic approach (touching and doing), writing is the most practical way for a student to put their hands on exercising literacy skills. You can show a child a word like flower, but when they are required to write it on their own they are required to slow down and consider each letter as they write it. Repetition will eventually help the recall on commonly used words become automatic.
Writing: The extension and the completion of the circle of language use
As we teach our children to become proficient with literacy skills, it isn’t enough to send them to school and put books in front of them. A multifaceted approach will keep a student’s interest and perhaps accommodate their learning style and make learning reading and writing much easier.
Early Intervention When Struggles Arise
The key to overcoming reading struggles is to catch them as early as possible. It’s really never too late to help a student with reading struggles but there is a window of opportunity when it is far less trouble to identify and resolve reading disorders. The ideal time to address any literacy problems is preschool through second grade. If you can identify and address reading difficulties during these early years, the student has a greater chance of improved reading skills.
Why early language intervention is better
Make Sure They Don’t Practice Bad Habits
The human brain is excellent at recalling information. The more an activity is repeated, the more likely it is that the brain holds onto that information to the point that the activity becomes automatic in the future. Mistakes are also subject to the brain’s uncanny ability to store and retrieve something that has been repeated frequently. The sooner you stop a student from mistakes while reading or writing, the better the chances are that the correct responses will become automatic rather than the mistakes.
Make Sure They Get the Help That They Need With Diagnosis
Early identification is important because the more specifics that we know about a child’s reading struggles, the sooner parents are able to help them with their struggles on a path to success. It could be as simple as finding out that a child requires glasses. It could also be something a bit more challenging like dyslexia. No matter what the reading struggle is, there is a way to work through the struggles and help the student to become successful.
Lighthouse Reader
For all types of reading challenges that there are, there are just as many resources available to help students. Lighthouse Reader is one of the best learning resources available to help your child because it provides a personalized experience for your student. Your child can use features like font color and size, top and bottom shading to cover excess print while reading, text to speech and karaoke modes, blocking words that have been read and words that are about to be read and much more.
Lighthouse Reader also evaluates your child’s learning progress with cloze assessments which enhance vocabulary knowledge and overall comprehension. The personalized reader uses your child’s favorite books from their booklists, either alone or with others by way of book chats, book clubs, tournaments and spelling bees. Parents can monitor and assign reading tasks and even reward their students as they earn badges for the completion of all of their hard work.
